Birmingham-based writer and filmmaker’s debut novel, Fire Damage, is set during the Birmingham Blitz of November 1940. Now he picks five more books set in the Midlands.
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
Take a revealing stroll down the smart Edwardian boulevards of cosmopolitan Birmingham in this compelling novel, based on a 1906 racially motivated miscarriage of justice, investigated in real life by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Bournville Barge Mystery by AS Baker
Perhaps you’d prefer to navigate the mysteries of smoke-stacked factories and the rigours of canal life during the 1920s, as vividly recreated in this fascinating novel, again inspired by real events and recorded in a diary kept by the author’s grandfather.
Hokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas
If you relish your murder with a side order of the weird, peculiar and downright yampy, you should immerse yourself in – quite literally, on occasion – this bejewelled art deco Brummie snowscape and genre-hopping mystery horror.
Needless Alley by Natalie Marlow
You could always tread the hardboiled but instantly recognisable mean streets of 1930s Birmingham with the relentless, war-damaged private eye William Garrett, a flawed but dogged gumshoe with a Brummie accent and sense of honour.
Little Moscow by Mick Scully
Why not enjoy a drink in the Little Moscow? The eponymous canalside bar, in this collection of noughties’ tales, is populated by a diverse criminal underworld which is darkly humorous, deeply humane and undeniably Birmingham.
